LEGACY

We've released a few titles now in to the iOS market, but it wasn't until our first multiplayer title that we got a good look at the current state of piracy.

With single player games you release them and don't really know to what extent a game is being pirated. However, when you release a multiplayer game that requires account creation to play you suddenly get a much clearer picture. The answer? Around 90% of our signups were coming from pirated copies of our game.

With single player games this isn't that big a deal, piracy can help popularity and even help increase legitimate sales. Civil War and Tank Battle are still high in the charts and doing great. But when you host multiplayer servers every player playing your game has a cost and 10 signups to every legitimate sale was a ratio none of us expected to have to cover.

We could have released the game for free with a heavy bias towards IAP (In App Purchases). But we are players of games ourselves and like a lot of you we don't like when the guy with the deepest pockets gets the biggest sword. At this point the future for Battle Dungeon looks uncertain, it wasn't designed as a free game funded entirely from IAP and we're not even sure if it's possible with our current game play model. Any future news will be posted here.

All in all, we've learned a lot from this and hope other developers can learn from our experience. In our opinion multiplayer mobile titles need to be 'free to play' with a heavy and appealing bias towards in app purchases if you wish to cover the costs of server hosting.

I'm sorry - but not surprised - to hear this. Here's a naive question... If you can detect pirated copies, can't you manually or automagically block account creation for those copies? Not sure how big your audience is right out of the blocks - hundreds... thousands... I was hoping to try this one out - it looked like a lot of fun. Here's to hoping that you can find a work-around.